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11 Apr2014

LINKIN PARK Wanted To Weed Out 'Soft' Side Of Music For New Disc

Posted in Worldwide News

According to The Pulse Of Radio, LINKIN PARK vocalist Mike Shinoda told Rolling Stone that the band's new album, "The Hunting Party", started out sounding like their last one, 2012's "Living Things", until Shinoda came to a realization. He explained, "It needed to be visceral. We need to weed out a lot of the soft, emo kind of approach to our music, and we need to weed out anything that feels aggressive for aggressive's sake. We're not 18-year-old kids making a loud record — we're 37-year-old adults making a loud record."Shinoda added that the current music scene, dominated by acts like VAMPIRE WEEKEND and CHVRCHES, was not inspiring him, saying, "I like indie music. I like indie pop. But at a certain point, I feel like that box had been checked and checked again."Singer Chester Bennington echoed Shinoda when he told The Pulse Of Radio that the band did start work on the new album in a different vein. "We were writing some of the songs that would fit really well with what's going on right now in music, especially in the alternative side of things, and they were all great songs, but by the time we got started working on them and getting into them, we were just kind of like, 'Ehhhhhhh, it's really cool when other people do it, but i think we should go somewhere else,'" he said.Rolling Stone described some of the songs featured on "The Hunting Party", which arrives on June 17, as "LINKIN PARK at their angriest and most adrenalized."Shinoda revealed that his manager and a radio promotion exec at his label told him, "This music is gonna have a real hard time living on rock radio. It's kind of a bad move. We can't rely on a home run at radio."Guests on "The Hunting Party" include rapper Rakim — who appears on current single "Guilty All The Same" — HELMET frontman Page Hamilton and SYSTEM OF A DOWN guitarist Daron Malakian.LINKIN PARK will head out on a co-headlining North American tour this summer with 30 SECONDS TO MARS that kicks off on August 8 in West Palm Beach, Florida.